SORDELLO 



'AY HOLLANL 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 





SORDELLO 



A STORY FROM ROBERT BROWNING 



FREDERIC MAY HOLLAND 

AUTHOR OF THE "REIGN OF THE STOICS 




NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET 
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COPYRIGHT BY 
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Press of 

G. P. Putnam s Sons 

New York 



SORDELLO. 



NEARLY seven hundred years ago the 
river Mincio formed around ' Mantua a 
great marsh, which separated the city from the 
low mountains covered with firs, larches, and 
rings of vineyard, among which stood the little 
castle of Goito. In that lonely fortress might 
have been seen a slender boy, in a loose page's 
dress, coming every sunset to sit beside each one, 
in turn, of the patient, marble girls who lay or 
crouched beneath a cumbrous font in one of the 
vaults, or watching the thievish birds at work 
among the grapes in autumn, or lurking, in the 
stormy winter evenings, beside the arras, and 
lifting a light with both hands to the embroid- 
ered forms of the ancestors of Eccelino da Ro- 
mano, surnamed il Monaco, a Ghibelline prince 
whose wife, Adelaide, was mistress of Goito. 
Her own apartments were closed against 



4 SORDELLO. 

our hero, who was known only as the or- 
phan child of Elcorte, an archer who, soon 
after the boy's birth in 1194, when the 
imperialists were driven out of Vicenza amid 
great slaughter and conflagration, had laid down 
his own life in saving his mistress, Adelaide, 
and her new-born son, afterward famous as 
Ecelin the Cruel. 

We find Sordello wandering at will over the 
rest of the castle, with its dim, winding stairs 
and maze of corridors contrived for sin, through 
the ravines down which slip the streamlets 
singing softly, and amid the forests of maples, 
myrtles and evergreens, which cover the hills 
that look toward Mantua. His calm brow, 
delicate nostrils, and sharp, restless lips, show 
that he is 

" Foremost in the regal class 
Nature has broadly severed from her mass 
Of men and framed for pleasure, as she frames 
Some happy lands that have luxurious names 
For loose fertility ; a footfall there 
Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
Half-germinating spices ; mere decay 
Produces richer life ; and day by day 
New pollen on the lily-petal grows, 



SORDELLO. - 5 

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose. 

You recognize at once the finer dress 

Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness 

At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled 

(As though she would not trust them with her world) 

A veil that shows a sky not near so blue, 

And lets but half the sun look fervid through." 

To all he saw that was lovely, he gave fresh 
life from his own soul. His ruling desire was 
to find something to worship, and bury himself 
in each external charm ; for he was not one of 
those strong souls which develop some new 
form of loveliness within to match each one that 
is seen without. His whole life was in his 
fancies. 

"As the adventurous spider, making light 
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, 
From barbican to battlement, so flung 
Fantasies forth, and in their centre swung 
Our architect, — the breezy morning fresh 
Above, and merry, — all his waving mesh 
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged." 

As he let his rough-hewn bow of ash sink 
from his aching wrist, he imagined that he had 
sent a golden shaft hissing through the Syrian 



6 SORDELLO. 

air to strike down some defender of Jerusalem 
against the crusaders. As he picked grapes 
and filberts, he dreamed of himself as the young 
emperor, Frederic the Second, quaffing wine 
with the Soldan, or looking at the bunch of 
dates which the titular King of the Holy City 
sent his imperial son-in-law, to remind him of 
his promise to reconquer Palestine. Or, again, 
he fancied himself Apollo, slaying the Python, 
and wooing Delian girls. 

All these inferior idols soon cast off their 
borrowed crowns before a coming glory. One 
evening he stumbled by accident on Eccelino's 
daughter, Palma, who sat thenceforth conspicu- 
ous in his world of dreams, with her blue eyes, 
her rich red lips, and her tresses flowing in, a 
gorgeous shower of gold, so that the ground 
was bright as with spilt sunbeams. The ser- 
vants fired his fancy by telling him how Palma 
had been promised by her father to the Guelf 
chief, Count Richard St. Boniface, one of the 
Capulets of Verona, and how the Ghibelline 
maiden rejected his suit. 

At last, as the first pink leaflets bud on the 
beech, and the larches brighten in the spring 



SORDELLO, 7 

sunrise, Sordello goes forth buoyantly, hoping 
that to-day's adventure will secure his visioned 
lady, 

" Whose shape divine 
Quivered in the farthest rainbow-vapor, glanced 
Athwart the flying herons." 

On he goes through the brakes of withered 
fern and over the great morass, shot through 
and through with flashing waters, each foot-fall 
sending up a diamond jet. Still Palma seems 
floating on before him, and he thinks that when 
he has passed the next wood he will hear her 
confess her love. 

He clears the last screen of pine trees be- 
fore Mantua, and there, under the walls, amid^a 
gay crowd of men and women, sits his lady, 
enthroned as Queen of the Court of Love, at 
which the troubadour, Eglamor, contends for her 
prize against all comers. The famous minstrel 
sings of Apollo, but before the people's frank 
applause is half done, Sordello has begun the 
true lay with the true end. On flies the song 
in a giddy race after the flying story, word 
making word leap forth, and rhyme, rhyme. 



8 BORDELLO. 

As he closes, the people shout, and crowd around 
him. Then Palma gives him the prize, and also 
a scented scarf, warm from her own neck, a 
great golden braid of her hair touching his 
cheek as she bends over him. He swoons with 
joy. When he wakes he is back at Goito, but 
a crown is on his forehead, the gorgeous ves- 
ture he has won is heaped up beside him, 
Palma's scarf is around his neck, and the women 
tell him that she has chosen him for her min- 
strel. Eglamor is dead with spite, but the 
other troubadours have brought home their 
new chief. 

Thus Sordello became one of the most pop- 
ular of Lombard poets, but he could not re- 
main so. He found his native Italian too crude 
a language to allow a tithe of his thoughts to 
reach the ear. He welded on new words, but 
they proved too artificial and cumbrous. Then 
again, he tried in vain to rise above the singers 
who simply tell of the lovely forms they see 
around them, and to become a poet who, 
through such pictures, gives revelations of the 
loveliness in his own nature, so that the hearers 
shall love in him the love that leads their souls 



SORDELLO. 9 

to perfection. The Mantuans would not see in 
Sordello any trait of even his meanest hero. 
Much as they applauded his praise of Montfort's 
victories over the Albigenses, they did not give 
him the credit of having any such courage of 
his own. Moreover, in praising this heresy- 
hunter, he found himself led into repeating the 
commonplace opinions prevalent around him ; 
and when he broke away from them and tried 
to give original ideas, he was blamed for being 
too abstruse and not building on the common 
heart, as a bard should do who was no philoso- 
pher. The praise he won as a poet did not 
seem to him what he merited as a man. He 
took less pains than before with his verses, and 
they gained less and less applause. At last his 
friends told him that his win^s seemed to have 
grown weak, and begged him to soar as high 
as he could in the song with which he had been 
chosen to greet the triumphal entrance into 
Mantua of the famous Ghibelline soldier, Salin- 
guerra. Sordello wandered about seeking 
vainly for inspiration, until he reached Goito, 
where he flung his crown of laurel into the font, 
and there was no song of welcome for the city's 
guest. 



IO SORDELLO. 

The minstrel remained silent and solitary 
in the lonely castle, but in Mantua there was 
great rejoicing. The sudden death of Adelaide 
enabled her husband, Eccelino da Romano, to 
take the step which gave him the surname of 
the Monk. He entered the cloister, and, as he 
did so, proclaimed a truce between the imperi- 
alists, who had been his partisans, and the ad- 
herents of the pope. To insure peace, he an- 
nounced that his daughter, Palma, should be 
married to Count Richard, and his two sons, 
Ecelin and Alberic, wed two Guelf ladies, 
Giglia and Beatrice. It was hatred of these al- 
liances that brought the fiercest of the imperi- 
alists to Mantua. Salinguerra was then sixty 
years old ; and he had been fighting against 
the Guelfs ever since boyhood, when they 
robbed him of his first love, Linguetta, as they 
did afterward of his young wife, Retrude, who 
was a daughter of the emperor, Henry VI, and 
who disappeared with her infant son in the Vi- 
cenza massacre soon after Sordello's birth. At 
the news of peace he left Naples and his em- 
peror, with whom he had promised to sail as a 
crusader, and rode half a score of horses dead 



SORDELLO. II 

in his haste to reach Lombardy. Before he ar- 
rived, however, matters had gone so far 
that he thought it best to pretend to acquiesce 
in the suspension of hostilities. So he showed 
no interest in anything but pageants, and even 
took the place of Palma's father, already a 
monk, at her betrothal with Count Richard. 

But in her he found a kindred spirit, and it 
was secretly agreed between them that the mar- 
riage should be postponed as long as possible 
and the first pretext for a rupture promptly 
seized. Accordingly, Palma was still delaying 
her journey to Verona, where she had promised 
to marry the count in his palace, when the 
Guelfs of Ferrara revolted against Salinguerra 
in his absence, burned his palace, and murdered 
the wives and children of his adherents. At 
once they found the old soldier back in their 
midst, setting street after street on fire, and rid- 
ing in blood up to his horse's fetlocks. Count 
Richard hastened with Azzo, Marquis of Este, 
and other leading- Guelfs, to drive Salinguerra 
out of Ferrara, but permitted himself to be de- 
coyed to a parley, at which he was treacher- 
ously taken prisoner. The whole Lombard 



12 SORDELLO. 

League of nearly twenty cities that took the 
side of the popes against the emperors rose in 
arms to deliver him from Salinguerra, who 
strengthened himself at Ferrara with great 
bands of mercenaries. 

Such was the state of things in the autumn 
of 1224, when Sordello, now thirty years old, 
met Palma at Verona. She had timed her 
journey so cunningly as to arrive just after 
Richard's departure, and thus gain a plausible 
pretext for charging him with breach of faith. 
She had sent for her minstrel, who received her 
summons on the very day on which an earth- 
quake changed the marsh, hitherto formed by 
the river Mincio around Mantua, into the lake 
which now laughs there. 

Sordello hastened to his mistress, though he 
thought that she only wished for him to com- 
pose the music for her marriage with his rival. 
He reached Verona while 

"A last remains of sunset dimly burned 
O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned 
By the wind back upon its bearer's hand 
In one long flare of crimson ; as a brand, 
The woods beneath lay black." 



SORDELLO. 13 

No eye but the poet's cared for the soft sky. 
Trumpets were pealing, and alarm-bells boom- 
ing. The carroccio, a car which carried the 
city's standard, the crucifix and a great bell into 
battle, was being dragged into the market- 
place, where the people were crowded together 
listening to the fiery speeches of their magis- 
trates, and eager to march against Salinguerra 
and show that Verona was no unworthy mem- 
ber of the great league. 

The count's palace had a dim closet which 
overlooked this tumult, and there Sordello and 
Palma sat with their fingers interlocked, while 
she told him, with a coy, fastidious grace, 

" Like the bird's flutter ere it fix and feed," 

how she had pined for some out-soul, as she 
called it, which should direct all the force that 
was expanding within her ; and how she had 
accepted him as her lord ever since that April 
morning when his face, not unknown to her, 
burst out from all the other faces at the Love 
Court. 

" I was vainly planning how to make you 
mine," she says, " when Salinguerra showed 



14 SORDELLO. 

me how to break loose from Count Richard 
and the Guelfs. My father and brothers have 
given up the leadership of the Lombard Ghi- 
bellines, the best part of our inheritance. You 
and I will take the vacant place. To-morrow 
morning I will put on a gay dress like yours, 
and we will flee together to Ferrara. There 
Salinguerra will recognize us as his superiors, 
and help us serve our emperor. Tell me if I 
am wrong in believing that this cause and this 
destiny are yours." 

Sordello was dumb with joy, and she took 
flight before he could express his rapture at the 
knowledge of her love, and the prospect of be- 
coming a king and embodying his own will in 
this aggregate of souls and bodies, as he had 
dreamed of doing. 

So he and Palma reached Ferrara, and found 
this lady-city perishing under the violence 
with which her brutal lovers tried to tear her 
from each other. A young Guelf was moaning 
at the sight of a shrivelled hand nailed to the 
charred lintel of the door-way, within which he 
had seen his father stand, bidding him farewell. 
An old Ghibelline howled over a little skull 



SORDELLO. 15 

with dazzling teeth, which he had dug up in the 
heap of rubbish where his house was burned. 
A deserter from Salinguerra came back to 
find his palace razed so adroitly that he did not 
know the spot, but sat on the edge of a choked- 
up tank ploughing the mud inside with his feet 
and singing the song with which the Ecelins 
rode into battle, until one fierce kick brought 
up his own mother's face, caught by the thick 
gray hair about his spur. Another Ghibelline 
had murdered his brother ; a woman of Ferrara 
offered to sell her own daughters to Sordello, 
and he heard Salinguerra boast of burning hos- 
tages alive. 

The sight of all this suffering led our hero up 
from dreaming of ruling men to aspiring to 
serve them. He confessed to Palma, as they 
talked that night alone beside a smouldering 
watch-fire, his unwillingness to join the Ghibel- 
lines. She urged that the Guelfs were just as 
cruel ; but he longed to find some better way 
than that pursued by either faction. One of 
the sentinels came up and bade him sing of 
Rome. Sordello welcomed the conception of 
this city as the point of light from which rays 



l6 SORDELLO. 

traversed all the world. In her he saw em- 
bodied a plan to put mankind in full possession 
of their rights. Visions of her laws and her 
new structures crowded upon him, and he felt 
himself called to build up her authority. He 
knew how zealously the popes and bishops had 
taken the part of the Lombard cities and de- 
fended them from emperors and nobles. This 
cause seemed that of the people against the 
princes, and of the future against the past. 

He faltered as he remembered how slowly 
Rome was built : the first generation satisfied 
with their caves, the second shaping their 
dreams into rafters and door-posts, but not 
solving the mystery of hinges, later ages bring- 
ing a goodly growth of brick and stone, and 
still later ones giving the world sewers, forums, 
amphitheatres and aqueducts, until alabaster and 
obsidian became common, and statues of Jove 
and Venus rose above the baths. His courage 
returned, however, as he remembered how 
rapidly Hildebrand built up the papal power, 
and how mightily this great pontiff's successors 
labored, joining strength with strength in the 
crusades, meeting pernicious strength with 



SORDELLO. 17 

strength in the Lombard League, and almost 
dispensing with any need of strength in the 
Truce of God. At last he resolved to imitate 
these great workers and begin by making a 
convert of Salinguerra. 

Just before sunset he found the old warrior 
sitting with Palma in his own dreary palace. 
He had been giving audience to the emperor's 
envoy, the pope's legate, and the league's am- 
bassadors, and was now complacently planning 
his next move, and considering what use he 
should make of the new badge of authority just 
sent him by his imperial master. Despite sixty 
years of fighting and scheming, he showed all 
the nonchalance of youth, 

" So agile, quick 
And graceful turned the head on the broad chest 
Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest, 
Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire 
Across the room ; and loosened of its tire 
Of steel, that head let breathe the comely, brown, • 
Large massive locks, discolored as if a crown 
Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where 
A sharp white line divided clean the hair. 

* * * Square-faced, 
No lion more ; two vivid eyes, enchased 



1 8 SORDELLO. 

In hollows filled with many a shade and streak 
Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek ; 
Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed 
A lip supremely perfect else — unwarmed." 

But thirty years of idle dreaming had left 
Sordello stunted, thin, worn-out, and really 
aged. He stammered, and was so awkward 
and bashful, that his speech at first deserved 
only scoff. Salinguerra, who, careless of his 
words as he seemed to be, had never been 
found at a loss for the right one, listened with 
good-natured contempt to one whom he knew 
only as an archer's orphan son and Palma's too 
much favored minstrel. Indeed, the Ghibelline 
veteran showed such scorn of the advice to re- 
lease his prisoner, open his gates to the 
league, and turn Guelf himself, that Sordello 
was roused to eloquence. He pleaded the 
cause of the people, whose faces he saw filling 
the dim chamber, so powerfully that Salin- 
guerra began to admire him and at last deter- 
mined to make him his ally. Suddenly he 
flung the emperor's badge around the orator's 
neck and welcomed him as Palma's husband, 
head of the Romano family, and leader of the 
Lombard Ghibellines. 



SORDELLO. 19 

And now, apparently without a single word 
being spoken, there sprang to light a secret 
which Palma had heard from her dying step- 
mother, namely, that Salinguerra's wife and 
child, who were supposed to have perished in 
that Vicenza massacre from which Elcorte 
saved Adelaide at the cost of his own life, had 
both been rescued. The mother died soon af- 
ter and was buried secretly in the font at Goito, 
but the son was kept there in concealment and 
neglect, under the name of Sordello, as El- 
corte's child by this crazy woman, who was 
jealous of Salinguerra's superiority to her own 
lord. Palma's knowledge of this treachery had 
encouraged her to attempt to restore his birth- 
right to Sordello, whom we will still call by this 
familiar name. 

He sat pale and silent, but his father laughed 
with joy, as he told how the emperor was going 
to destroy the papal power and place all Lom- 
bardy under a prefect, whom he himself had 
leave to name. His son must take this office, 
and reign over not only Lombardy but Tuscany, 
in virtual independence of Frederic himself. 
So he ran on, until Palma drew his iron arms 



20 SORDELLO. 

away from the shrinking shoulders of Sordello, 
who rose, tried to speak, and then sank back. 
They left him, his father reeling dizzily down 
the narrow stairs into a dim corridor, lighted 
only by a grating which showed in the west a 
ragged jet of fierce, gold fire. There he sat 
down on a stone bench and splintered it with 
his truncheon, until Palma began to repeat her 
lover's poems, and tell how all the world loved 
him and thought that his wan face eclipsed 
even Count Richard's. Salinguerra drank in 
every word, as though an angel spoke, and as 
she finished praising his son, 

" He drew her on his mailed knees, made 

Her face a framework with his hands, a shade, 
A crown, an aureole : there she must remain 
(Her little mouth compressed with smiling pain, 
As in his gloves she felt her tresses twitch)." 

Soon he kissed her brow, placed her beneath 
the window, as in the fittest niche for his saint, 
and began to pace up and down the passage, 
pouring forth scheme upon scheme of what he 
would do for her as soon as she should wed 
that foolish boy. 



SORDELLO. 21 

At last they heard Sordello stamp his foot, 
and both rushed up stairs to him anxiously, the 
father taking the lead despite his heavy mail. 

Sordello sat gazing at the river, until its* 
sky-like space of water became one richness of 
stars, and the moon rose slowly to complete 
the heaven. He felt that he had needed some 
steady purpose to uplift his soul, as the moon 
sways the ocean. Lacking such an influence 
he had been so shaken by every caprice that 
he had lived without a purpose, and so missed 
life's crown, while others with not half his 
strength had finished their work. 

" The Body, the machine for acting Will, 
Had been at the commencement proved unfit ; 
That for reflecting, demonstrating it 
Mankind,— no fitter ; was the Will itself 
In fault?" 

He still wished to serve the people, but 
really doing it seemed so doubtful that he was 
sorely tempted to accept the crown his father 
offered him, and live only for present pleasures, 
leaving the future out of sight. Then he 
thought of the sages, champions and martyrs, 



22 SORDELLO. 

who dashed aside the cup of pleasure and so 
gained the better life which this life conceals. 
His body was too weak to endure this fierce 
mental struggle, but it closed by submitting 
himself entirely to that sole and immutable 
power which does not forbid us to love aught 
that is lovely, and which is to be loved as it is 
revealed in our humanity. 

With his last remaining strength he stamped 
on the emperor's badge. Salinguerra and 
Palma found it lying under his feet, as he sat 
there — dead, 

" Under his foot the badge ; still, Palma said, 
A triumph lingering in the wide eyes, 
Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies 
Help from above in his extreme despair, 
And head far back on shoulder thrust, turns there 
With short, quick, passionate cry ; as Palma prest 
In one great kiss her lips upon his breast, 
It beat." 

They laid him beside his mother in the stone 
font he loved. Nothing now remains of him 
but a name in the chronicle and a few verses 
still sung at Asolo. Thus ends the story told 
in the hope that it may help 



SORDELLO. 23 

" Some soul see All — 
The great Before and After and the small 
Now, yet be saved by this, the simplest lore, 
And take the single course prescribed before, 
As the king-bird, with ages on his plumes, 
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms." 



NOTE. 



This poem resembles its hero in having too much 
exuberance of fancy, and too little steadiness of 
purpose, for success. Indeed, it is one of the most 
incomprehensible in all literature. Sordello's char- 
acter, aspirations and adventures are not such as 
can easily be made intelligible, even in the simplest 
prose, and to the difficulties necessary, on account of 
the subject are added several others occasioned by 
the treatment. , In the first place, there is at least 
one bad misprint in the American edition ; namely, 
in the second line on page 215, which speaks of 

"A child barefoot and rosy. She ! " 

This apparently refers to a girl, but five lines later 
the child is called " that boy," and it is impossible 
to find out what " She " is meant. The latest Eng- 
lish edition, however, shows that " She " should be 
" See ! " The punctuation is peculiar and puzzling, 



24 SORDELLO. 

especially in its paucity of commas and profusion of 
dashes and parentheses. There are a great many 
rare words like carroch, phanal, trabea, fulgurant. 
demiurge, miramoline, mollitious, stibadium, raunce, 
reate, weft of hair, etc. The style is often either too 
compressed or too redundant to be clear, and the 
grammatical construction is sometimes not to be 
made out readily. Then again, the poem is full of 
subtle suggestions and delicate discriminations, 
which are but obscurely hinted at, and which richly 
repay careful study. Such study is further made 
more difficult by some of the pages being crowded 
with names either slightly known in history or else 
wholly fictitious but spoken of as if perfectly 
familiar to the reader. Perhaps the difficulty which 
would most trouble any one who reads this poem 
for the first time, is that the order of narration is 
often inverted, and is interrupted midway by a di- 
gression of fifteen pages, desc'bing a visit of the 
spirit of humanity to the poet as he sat planning 
this work on the steps of a ruined palace, where 

"Venice seems a type 
Of Life — twixt blue and blue extends, a stripe, 
As Life, the somewhat, hangs twixt naught and naught ! " 

Nettleship, in his " Essays on Robert Browning's 
Poetry," gives a thorough analysis of this digression, 
which closes with a legend of John the Evangelist 
who, when banished from Antioch to Patmos, 



SORDELLO. 25 

" Set apart the closing eve 
To comfort those his exile most would grieve," 

namely, the family of Xanthus ; but as he entered 
his disciple's house the apostle saw a picture, at the 
sight of which 

" Dead swooned he, woke 
Anon, heaved sigh, made shift to gasp, heart-broke : 
1 Get thee behind me, Satan ! have I toiled 
To no more purpose ? Is the gospel foiled 
Here too, and o'er my son's, my Xanthus' hearth, 
Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth — 
Ah, Xanthus, am I to thy roof beguiled 
To see the — the — the Devil domiciled ? ' 
Whereto sobbed Xanthus : ' Father, 'tis yourself 
Installed, a limning which our outmost pelf 
Went to procure against to-morrow's loss ; 
And that's no twy-prong, but a pastoi - al cross 
You're painted with.' " 

The principal defect of the poem, besides its ob- 
scurity, is its undue partiality for the Church of 
Rome. There is no mention of the fact that many 
of the Tuscan towns had already offered fierce 
opposition to her tyranny, as did most of the free 
cities of Germany. Dante, devout Catholic and 
pure patriot as he was, rejected the temporal author- 
ity of the popes with all his sternness. So in reality 
did Sordello, who seems to have been somewhat 
noted as a Ghibelline champion. And, certainly, 
Browning does no justice to Frederic the Second. 
This emperor gave full tolerance and protection 



26 ' SORDELLO. 

to his Jewish arid Moslem subjects, endowed profes- 
sorships of Hebrew, Greek and Arabic at Salerno, 
spoke Italian, German, Latin, French, Arabic, and 
apparently even Greek, made a treaty with the Sul- 
tan which threw* Jerusalem open to Christian pil- 
grims, founded the Universities of Naples and 
Padua, had Aristotle translated into Latin, encour- 
aged free trade and the emancipation of the 
peasantry from serfdom, made laws protecting the 
chastity of women, abolished feudal and ecclesiasti- 
cal tribunals, established parliaments in which the 
middle class was represented, and raised Sicily and 
Southern Italy, where he had more power than in 
the rest of the empire, to a prosperity enjoyed by no 
other country in Europe. Thus he was much more 
truly the champion of peace, freedom and culture 
than were the popes who opposed his plans and stirred 
up his subjects to rebellion, at the same time that 
they forbade King John to keep his oath to carry 
out the Great Charter of the liberties of England, 
and advised Henry III to feign observance of this 
solemn covenant until he could renounce it success- 
fully. 'These pontiffs, who were Sordello's contem- 
poraries, are principally noted, however, for their 
zeal in urging on those crusades which sent the 
flower of European chivalry to perish uselessly in 
Syria and Egypt, and which laid waste the fairest 
region of France, the cradle of modern literature, of 
artistic industry, and of enlightened Christianity. 



SORDELLO. 27 

Browning could not have given such a favorable 
view of these popes, if he had taken any note of the 
sufferings inflicted during a war of thirty-five years 
on millions of peaceable, industrious and intelligent 
Provengals by hordes of ruffians who always re- 
joiced greatly when they saw their prisoners burnt 
alive, as sometimes happened to hundreds at once, 
and who spared neither women nor children, but 
massacred every human creature they found in 
Beziers, to the number, as was boasted, of a hundred 
thousand, while the ferocious monks shouted: 

" Kill all ! God will know his own ! " 

Meantime the popes rewarded the perpetrators of 
these and yet fouler atrocities by pardoning all their 
sins, and forbade them even to keep faith with here- 
tics. And among the encouragers of this wicked- 
ness must be included one of the great men of the 
age, St. Dominic, about whom nothing is said in 
" Sordello," while there is only a bare mention of St. 
Francis. It is certainly singular that an author who 
makes so much note of insignificant details of the 
political and literary history of the opening years 
of the thirteenth century should say so little about 
the famous Albigensian war and the establishment 
of the two great mendicant orders. Perhaps we 
should not wonder that a weak visionary fails to see 
where his services belong and so perishes miserably, 
but it is not right that the reader should be left in 
the same ignorance. 



28 SORDELLO. 

Otherwise the poem is not without historic basis. 
There actually was a poet named Sordello, but he 
did not die at thirty, and he was not the son of Salin- 
guerra Torello. The latter's life, however, is given 
accurately in most respects. The heroine was really 
the Cunizza whom Dante places in his third heaven, 
but Browning confounds her with her half-sister, 
Palma, because the latter name is more euphonious. 
Many particulars about her lover may be found in 
Tiraboschi (Storia della Letter atur a Ita/iana, Tomo 
iv, pag. 531, Milano: 1823), and also in Longfellow's 
notes on the " Purgatorio," before whose gate Dante 
meets his forerunner. Some account of the latter's 
poetry is given by Millot (Histoire Litte'raire des 
Troubadours, Paris : 1774, Tome ii, p. 79), and 
also by Rutherford (The Troubadours \ Their Loves 
and their Lyrics. London : Smith, Elder & Co., 
1873, pp. 48, 65-7). Thirty-four of Sordello's poems 
are extant, some satirical and others amorous. All 
are in Provencal, but he seems to have also written 
in his native Italian. Some of these pieces are so 
good that it is strange that Browning did not 
translate or imitate any of them, or introduce a 
single real song into a poem where there are sev- 
eral minstrels. He seems to have been satisfied 
with endowing his troubadour with too luxuriant 
an imagination and too weak a will for him to be 
able to express himself adequately. How well 
Sordello really wrote may be judged from the 



SORDELLO. 29 

specimens given by Rutherford and Millot. From 
the latter's version in modern French I take these 
lines : 

" I love a lady, fair without a peer, 

Serve her I'd rather, though she ne'er requite 
My love, than give myself to other dames, 
However richly they might pay their knight. 
Requite me not ? Nay. He who serves a dame 
Whose honor, grace and virtue shine like day, 
Can do no service which the very joy 
Of doing doth not bounteously repay. 
For other recompense I will not pine, 
But should it come, her pleasure still is mine." 






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